“What Is My Goal?”: Inside the Tense Roundtable to “Define” Jill Biden’s Legacy

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Joe Biden has been focused on his presidential legacy for so long that he wasted no time ushering a group of historians into the White House once he finally got the job. Six weeks after taking office, he met with presidential scholars in the East Room to discuss what sort of president he could be, should ambitious plans for social spending and infrastructure bear fruit.

The listening session was organized by Jon Meacham, a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer and historian who moonlights as a Biden speechwriter. Other attendees included the author Michael Eric Dyson and a selection of historians from Ivy League universities. (Though Joe has emphasized his lack of Ivy credentials, in practice he is happy to be surrounded by advisers who have them.) Meacham was the person the president looked to when he wanted to muse about what the Biden presidency could mean when viewed against the long scope of history—a favorite topic for the politician who, when he was elected at seventy-seven, was the oldest commander in chief the country had ever seen.

It would not be the president’s last check-in with historians, but his first meeting with them in office was notable because very few meetings like this were being held at the White House at that time. On March 2, 2021, the day of the meeting, the coronavirus vaccine was still not widely available. Masking mandates and public health guidelines on social distancing were still strict. Very few people were authorized to be in the same room with the president, lest they be unwitting vectors for disease. In the meeting with historians, the paper covering their water glasses was embossed with a golden presidential seal.

The sit-down occurred as the Biden administration was working to contain a wily virus; put checks on an aggressive authoritarian, Vladimir Putin of Russia; and craft a sizable social spending plan to sell to the American public. Given the hectic backdrop, a meeting with historians sounded like Joe’s idea of a good time. It was one of very few in-person pandemic visitations he had been allowed to enjoy with people outside of his tight circle of aides and family members.

As he eyed social spending and infrastructure legislation that, together, could add up to more than $3 trillion, he was curious to know what some of his most admired predecessors had done to secure their transformative legacies: How much change, he wondered, could the United States tolerate at once?

“I’m no FDR, but . . .” Biden said to the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin at one point, a reference to one of his heroes, the news site Axios reported. Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian, compared what the president was trying to accomplish to the New Deal, the Great Depression–era relief plan Franklin Delano Roosevelt championed in 1933 to help stabilize the American economy.

By the end of the meeting, Biden felt satisfied with the comparisons to historical giants. He told an aide that he could have gone another two hours listening about presidential history and scribbling notes in his little black notebook.

The invitees to that meeting recalled a West Wing so quiet that it felt like a snow day. Across the White House, the East Wing was similarly calm, mostly because March 2, 2021, was a Tuesday. This meant that Jill was scheduled to teach. While the president picked the brains of historians in the chandelier-studded opulence of the East Room, the First Lady was in her office, teaching English over Zoom to community college students.

Unlike her husband, who has been ruminating over his presidential legacy since the Carter era, Jill Biden has not spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about what her own impact on history might look like. But over a year after Jill’s husband first summoned historians to the White House, she invited a group of them to the East Wing.

A year into the presidency, the sense among people close to Jill was that she was not doing enough to shape her legacy as First Lady. Several people, including Cathy Russell, Jill’s former chief of staff and a close friend, had urged her to make the most of her time in office—whether that was four or eight years. Russell had left Biden world to become the executive director of UNICEF, but she was still an occasional presence around the East Wing, taking walks with Jill on the South Lawn out of earshot of her deeply curious aides. Privately, Russell had encouraged her to think about streamlining the many trips she was taking in the service of her husband’s policy goals into one cohesive initiative that fit more into the grand tradition of modern First Ladies who focused on a single issue, according to people familiar with their discussions.

Jill was bucking modern tradition: Hillary Clinton maintained an office in the West Wing and used her platform to champion healthcare—for which she would pay the political price—and do what she could to bolster women’s rights around the world. Laura Bush, who was more of an activist and steadying force as First Lady than much of the coverage at the time gave her credit for, became an advocate for Afghan women and girls. Michelle Obama launched the fitness- and nutrition-focused Let’s Move campaign. Melania Trump had funneled her efforts into a child-focused platform called Be Best—not that anyone in Jill’s orbit would ever say she was an example worth emulating. Jill had followed her own instinct to keep a broad profile while maintaining her teaching career, but she took Russell’s private advice to heart.

In January 2022, Jill gathered her staff for a weekend retreat at Camp David to discuss a way forward. What could she be doing better? Did she need a single issue? Even if she only had one term, what should her legacy be?

Jill knew that Laura Bush, who was concerned about shaping her identity for the press and for the history books, had once organized a panel of historians and East Wing experts to share their insights, so she asked her staff to arrange the same thing. She wanted to quiz them on how she was perceived, and what she should do with her role, yes, but she also wanted to explain herself and her choices. The event, she told her staff, was to be no longer than ninety minutes—and nothing so formal as a lunch. The event would be a simple coffee in the Blue Room, the oval-shaped parlor in the middle of the state floor of the White House.

The guest list, according to several people who attended, included Allida Black, a preeminent scholar on Eleanor Roosevelt who had been an adviser to Hillary Clinton, and Susan Page, the author of a biography on Barbara Bush. Anita McBride, a former chief of staff to Laura Bush, was also invited, as was Karen Tumulty, an opinion columnist from The Washington Post and author of a biography on Nancy Reagan. Authors Carl Anthony and Diana Carlin rounded out the guest list.

The timing of the event immediately struck at least one of the invitees as odd. Laura Bush had held her own historian summit toward the end of her second term as First Lady. Jill Biden was in a trickier part of her tenure: She was only a year in—and yet, she was already a year in.

“A year plus into this and only now are they trying to figure out what she is going to do with it?” one invitee, who spoke anonymously to preserve relationships, recalled thinking. “It isn’t like she didn’t spend eight years watching a First Lady at close range. So, what takes a year and a half?”

The group gathered in the Blue Room in April 2022, a week after the Gridiron Dinner. Under the watchful eyes of portraits of William Taft, James Monroe, and John Tyler, the First Lady opened the discussion by explaining that she had been unable to think about her role in traditional terms. The political violence of the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol Building, coupled with the coronavirus pandemic, she said, had rerouted her ambitions. She told the group that what she saw during her campaign travel was “a nation that needed to heal” from the shock of a pandemic and the rawness of a divisive political season.

She had wanted to position herself as a healer for the nation: someone who could travel to any community, liberal or conservative, and listen to the concerns of American citizens. She had prized her willingness to shake hands and give hugs and pep talks as a special kind of political talent. After all, she was just about the only person in her husband’s orbit who saw outside of the administration’s bubble, not only in her First Lady role but also as part of her day job. But she was beginning to wonder if it was all enough.

“What interests me is how you see the role,” she told the historians, according to a recording of the meeting. “I don’t want to focus on the pandemic but how you see the role evolving, changing. How you define it. What kind of things are you looking at? What interests you?”

She offered up an idea of her own first: As part of her work in education, she had become interested in meeting with young women and young mothers and found it so rewarding that she had started a mentoring program at NOVA. It had pained her to step away from the program to help Joe campaign. Perhaps she could help staff members on Capitol Hill.

“You know what? Maybe I should go up to the Senate, talking about mentoring. Just talking to the women who are up there who are young moms, maybe single moms. Just women who are starting their careers and finding their own paths, and just having a dialogue with

them, and how interesting it would be to mentor, to carry on this theme of mentoring. I’m just thinking about that in different ways.”

Then she stopped and beckoned the historians to weigh in. “Just jump in,” she said. “I don’t know. Maybe this would be easier if we had wine.”

What followed was a free-for-all from a group of historians whose feedback suggested that her interests were not expansive enough. “I’m not saying you have to be Hillary, you have to be Hillary, you have to be Nancy,” Allida Black said. “But for example, community colleges or second-chance programs: Testify on the Hill.” That suggestion drew a wry smile from the First Lady, who, at this point in her tenure, had little faith in the functional capacity of a Biden-era Congress.

She was unmoved as the historians, one after another, regaled her with the work previous First Ladies, including Lady Bird Johnson, had done to discreetly tie their trips and visits to their husbands’ legislative agendas.

“Congress is different now,” Jill told them bluntly at one point.

As the conversation continued, members of the East Wing staff, who were sitting coiled and had grown increasingly defensive, jumped into the discussion. Mala Adiga, Jill’s policy director, interjected to defend their work, rattling off a list of initiatives that Jill had participated in as Second Lady, from highlighting the importance of community college to supporting military families. Their struggle, Adiga said, was “sort of reconciling what we know she does versus what the public knows.”

But at different moments throughout the meeting—which, true to the directive, ran about ninety minutes—the First Lady was either unable or unwilling to share the particulars of what she wanted to achieve, which of her predecessors she wanted to emulate, or what she wanted her legacy to be.

When one historian asked her what her overall goal was, she seemed puzzled. “What is my goal?” she repeated back, as if she had never pondered such a question. Such a question sounded silly to her. Hadn’t she always been clear? She had wanted her husband to win, and she wanted to keep her career. She had worked alongside Joe for decades to make his goals happen, overcoming her own sense of discomfort with politics and the isolation she felt raising their family while Joe toiled away in the Senate. Her family had been scrutinized, the closets thrown open and the skeletons dragged out. She had lost a son, Beau, to cancer, and another, Hunter, had been battling a devastating addiction to crack cocaine. And all of that had been open for public consumption. Now a group of people she’d invited into the White House were sitting in front of her and asking, Okay, but what else?

Another historian tried the same question in a different way: At the end of eight years, what would she most like to say she had done with the role?

“I can’t really choose just one,” she replied. She listed free community college and “changing cancer as we know it” before quickly switching back to a topic she was more comfortable with: her husband’s record on civil rights and education reform. The interactions illustrated the limits of her patience with being asked for more and moving beyond what she felt she had already given. The feedback from the group was a franker assessment than she had expected. Allida Black suggested that she branch out from the issues that Americans saw her as personally involved with, which included military families and cancer research—both issues that had emotional ties to Beau.

“The meeting that I was in was not a fluff meeting,” Black said in a later interview regarding the meeting in the Blue Room. She declined to describe the meeting at length, except to confirm that it had happened.

Still, after spending ninety minutes with a First Lady and an East Wing staff that seemed more interested in continuing as usual than developing another formal initiative, several attendees left feeling unsure about which of their suggestions, if any, had made a lasting impression.

Afterward, alone with her staff, Jill winced at the idea that the historians thought she was only doing what was personally important to her, despite the element of truth to that feedback. The Bidens have been safely ensconced among their loyalists for decades but have often publicly said that they wanted to hear from people outside of their established bubbles. The feedback, at least momentarily, jarred Jill, who had come into the White House set on managing her routine as a working educator and juggling the neatly organized policy items her staff had laid out for her. The suggestion that she was only undertaking those causes because she was personally attracted to them was not something she was used to hearing.

But Jill had decided long ago that the best use of her skills was not lobbying lawmakers or testifying on Capitol Hill. After almost half a century in public life, and with the last fifteen years spent watching the state of American politics go from partisan to polarized and tribal, she believed that she was at her best when she was speaking to and hearing directly from the people her husband was hoping to reach.

In October 2022, I asked her if she had given any more thought to how she wanted to be remembered beyond being a wife, a mother, and a First Lady who did not give up her independence and her career. After nearly two years in the role, after all the questions about portfolios and issues and messaging, she seemed unconcerned with the idea that she should do more to define herself. She seemed in no rush.

“Well, not really. I mean, it’s also—it feels so new, actually,” she said. “You know, even with eight years as Second Lady, this is a whole different thing, just a whole different responsibility. The platform is so much bigger. So, not yet, but stay tuned.”

In the years since Hillary Clinton blazed into the White House and left as a senator-elect, modern First Ladies have struggled with the idea that they should leave a substantial lasting legacy, something that could signal to generations far from now that they existed and that they had tried. They all struggle with feeling understood.

From the book AMERICAN WOMAN: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, from Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden by Katie Rogers. Copyright © 2024 by Katie Rogers. Published by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

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